Time-lapse images are used in a variety of applications including determining seed-lot growth rates, analyzing mechanical wear or corrosion, generating calibration signatures for oil exploration, and generating special effects for the advertising, media and motion picture industries.
High-quality time-lapse image sequence generation requires accurate repositioning of an imaging device relative to the subject of interest. Most current techniques for repositioning imaging devices require complex and expensive hardware.
Mathematical formulae for extracting the pose (camera center and orientation relative to the scene of interest) of an imaging device are known. Multiple View Geometry In Computer Vision by Richard Hartley and Andrew Zisserman, Cambridge University Press 2000 presents a full treatment of the required math. Similar mathematical techniques are used for blending images into panoramas or steadying an image subject to camera jitter.
Industries such as construction and re-modeling are increasingly relying on photographic documentation of different stages of construction. Typical use of photo documentation is to safely cut into finished wall when opening up finished surfaces at some later date. The cutting may be occasioned by any of a number of fact patterns, including responding to change orders, repairs, maintenance, re-modeling or re-purposing of rooms, wings, or building.
As large institutional construction projects increasingly use teams of contractors and subcontractors over long periods of time, ongoing challenges exist not only with respect to documentation of construction stage, but also meaningful communication between parties in many locations regarding the project. The use of captured images transmitted over, for example, the Internet or World Wide Web, provide wide flung team members visual documentation. However, in addition to viewing construction site images, a need exists for images to meaningfully augment or replace a site visit. More specifically, the two dimensional representation of the three dimensional space, ideally, would permit accurate measurement and analysis.
Currently some methods exist for preparing a captured image so as to enable such measurement capability. At least one commercially available product, Photomodeler, extracts information from a scene by projecting a uniform screen of dots. Such an approach is impractical for large construction projects. What is needed is an accurate and automatic means to provide Users with an image of a scene of interest (i.e. a room, wall, etc.) where accurate dimensions may be obtained from the image, rather than from a site visit or manual measurement of the construction site or building. As greater numbers of construction, engineering and design professionals are collaborating worldwide, such a tool would greatly facilitate planning, cost containment, and productive collaboration. Applicant has taught an innovative method and system for accurately re-positioning image capture devices (U.S. application Ser. No. 10/811,019, System for Accurately Repositioning Imaging Devices). What is needed is an improved means to obtain a set of transformations from a two dimensional image of a scene of interest to the actual three-dimensional scene of interest. Moreover, a challenge that still exists is how to automatically generate for the user viewing displayed captured images a means to calculate accurate scale of the real world scene using the photograph or other captured image.